Keeping Connected: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘In a Room and a Half’

Peter Lowe looks at Brodsky’s own experience of isolation, through his description of his family home in a Soviet communal apartment.

The interior of the Joseph Brodsky’s Museum, Saint Petersburg. Photo credit: brodskymuseum.com

Thomas De Waal’s translation and feature on Joseph Brodsky’s 1970 poem ‘Don’t Leave Your Room’, (published on the Blog on 25th March) reminded us how in the early stages of the pandemic its words took on an unexpected and powerful new meaning. Offering as it does a series of arguments against leaving the space in question (“It’s not exactly France outside”) and a final injunction to turn the room into a stronghold to keep out the world beyond (“Make that wardrobe a barricade. The fates require us / To keep out Cosmos, Chronos, Eros, Race and Virus!”) the poem is, as De Waal noted, a satirical message for an intelligentsia more at home in their domestic sphere than in any engagement with wider, external reality. Brodsky, he added, “would have hated to be told to self-isolate.” The isolation proposed in his poem is superficially wise but ultimately self-defeating.

Although the pandemic has disrupted many planned activities, 2020 is, at least, the year when Brodsky received the recognition of having his former communal apartment at Number 24 on Saint Petersburg’s Liteiny Prospect opened as a memorial museum. Here, with projections on the walls giving visitors a sense of the furnishings he would have had around him, it is possible for visitors to access the domestic space in which he and his parents lived.

For those of us not already in the city, actually visiting the Museum might have to wait for the time being, but Brodsky’s writings can still give us a route there. As we may have tackled our ‘lockdown reading’ piles of books, I’ve been discovering Brodsky’s essays, and in ‘In a Room and a Half’ (written in 1985 as the conclusion to the 1986 volume Less Than One) I found another ‘room’ in Brodsky’s thought. It is one that may speak more to us four months into ‘lockdown’, where feelings of distance and isolation have become more acute.

Here, the room is both a physical space and a site of memory: that same communal apartment in Leningrad in which his parents remained after his expulsion from the USSR in 1972. Even as he evokes it, though, he knows that it is a place he will almost certainly never see again; a loss rendered all the more painful by the fact that both of his parents died while he was in the United States, unable to cross back over the border that had closed behind him, when his life in the West as a forced émigré, university professor, and world-renowned Nobel Prize-winning poet began.

Brodsky carries in the essay the painful knowledge that for him this is a permanent state in which no reunion is possible; that in remembering his parents he is also aware that he has lost them

The sense of distance works both ways in the essay: Brodsky’s parents were never able to secure the visas that would have permitted them to leave the USSR and meet their son, however briefly. “Twelve years of dashed, rekindled, and dashed-again hopes” came between them, filled not with letters (too easily opened by the prying eyes of the KGB) so much as telephone conversations filled with reticence in case a stray word led to further trouble for someone. In this awkwardness both parties fell back on “oblique and euphemistic” comments in discussions of the weather or someone’s health problems in order to experience “the main thing […] hearing each other’s voice.” Would Zoom, Skype, or Facebook messenger have made the situation any easier, or would the addition of a visual element have compounded the sense of isolation further? It is perhaps irrelevant to see it as an issue of technology. The distance remains, Brodsky tells us, however we try to reduce our sense of it.

In this sense, the essay could give us a bleak mirror for our current situation: a world in which barriers (more biological than ideological in our case, but often every bit as politicized) keep families and friends apart, suspended in the hope that some change in the situation might permit a reunion at some as yet undetermined future point. Brodsky, indeed, carries in the essay the painful knowledge that for him this is a permanent state in which no reunion is possible; that in remembering his parents he is also aware that he has lost them, without the chance of saying farewell or even the prospect of returning to the place they once shared. Evoking as it does the space of a communal apartment in Leningrad, a turn of the 20th century block whose enfiladed rooms had been crudely remodeled for communal life by Soviet officialdom, his essay is also an elegy for Saint Petersburg itself, the subject, elsewhere in the collection, of another piece entitled ‘A Guide to a Renamed City’ in which he charts the growth of a place that shaped the lives of him and his parents, and which he was destined not to see again.

Once inside its walls, the apartment becomes a space that is both contested and relatively secure. Brodsky recalls that his parents were rarely interested in walking around the streets of Saint Petersburg, preferring once their working days were over to retire to an environment shaped by familiar items of furniture (the bed, the immense dressers in which a host of goods both practical and decorative were stored) and the structure of domestic routine. He recalls, too, that his younger self tried a host of ways to establish his own ‘space’ within the living area, with a desk and bookshelves partitioning the apartment to give him a sense of his own presence in it.

In an essay that returns frequently to the ways in which children locate themselves within, and then come to outlive their parents’ reality, the apartment space becomes an arena in which the future poet found himself. Brodsky remembers it fondly, because it has shaped him and continues, through memory, to do so, even seen from the relative financial security and the public acclaim of his adopted American home.

Filled as it is with a sense of loss, then, ‘In a Room and a Half’ nonetheless also reminds us that nothing is really lost if we, like Brodsky, can remember it. Denied the chance to visit not only his home but anywhere in his homeland, he choses to recollect and preserve in memory a lost space and the people with whom it is inextricably bound. Memory here is not a tool for nostalgia, but a capacity to think of a place and imaginatively reconnect with the people in it. The essay becomes, briefly, a two-way mirror that not only allows the living Brodsky to revisit a lost home but for his parents to “observe me at present, sitting in the kitchen of the apartment that I rent from my school, writing this in a language they didn’t understand.” Like using a webcam to give a virtual tour of one’s home in the midst of a conversation, “this is their only chance to see me and America. This is the only way for me to see them and our room.”

Appropriately, perhaps, for a reader in our current situation, the essay never wholly overcomes its sense of loss and isolation, but never surrenders to it either. In language (and particularly in Brodsky’s decision to write in English rather than using the Russian words that he sees as having been complicit in his parents’ persecution) memories return and people – separated by illness, distance, or even mortality – are reconnected. In the ‘time war’ that he sees being fought between our ability to preserve what we cannot see or cannot, temporarily or permanently, hope to experience and the larger forces of state-sponsored separation Brodsky reminds us that nothing is ever truly lost, even if it can feel painfully distant from where we currently are. The ‘memory room’ can survive if we leave it, and if we keep it in our thoughts we can survive its physical absence. As he wrote in the 1989 poem ‘Constancy’, “evolution is not a species’ / adjustment to a new environment but one’s memories’ / triumph over reality.”

For details of the Brodsky Museum visit http://brodskymuseum.com/ 

About the author

Dr Peter Lowe teaches classes in English Literature at the Bader International Study Centre, East Sussex. His interests are in the culture and history of the early 20th century in Russia and in western Europe, and he is currently researching the nature and uses of 'nostalgia' in the early Soviet period